Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr at Weehawken

There are quarrels which are political and quarrels which are private, and there are quarrels which a man understands to be neither, but a settlement of his own account with the country he has made. Such a quarrel cannot be put down on paper, cannot be answered by retraction, cannot be carried in the legislature or the press. It must be carried, by the convention of the age, to a piece of ground outside the jurisdiction of the city in which the principals live, and there decided by the smoothbore pistol at ten paces, in the half-light before working hours, with two seconds and a surgeon in attendance and the river between the duelling-ground and the law.

THE WEST INDIAN

Alexander Hamilton was forty-seven years old, an immigrant from Nevis in the Leeward Islands, born out of wedlock, raised behind a counting-house desk on St. Croix, brought to New York at seventeen by the subscription of merchants who had read his account of the hurricane of 1772 and judged the boy worth schooling. He had served as aide-de-camp to General Washington through the war, written fifty-one of the eighty-five papers of the Federalist, drafted the bank and the mint and the customs and the public credit of the United States, and quitted the Treasury in 1795 with the funded debt of the new nation in working order and his own purse empty. He practised the law in lower Manhattan. He had a wife, Elizabeth Schuyler, of the patroon family at Albany, and seven living children; his eldest son Philip had been killed in a duel on the same Weehawken ground three years before, at nineteen, and the second daughter Angelica had lost her reason at the news and never recovered it. Aaron Burr, his junior at the New York bar, his colleague in the Revolution, Vice President of the United States, was a man Hamilton had opposed without ceasing for fifteen years: in the Senate election of 1791, in the presidential deadlock of 1800 when Hamilton's letters to the Federalist members of the House had given Jefferson the chair over Burr, in the gubernatorial canvass of New York in the spring of 1804 when Hamilton's table-talk at Judge Tayler's house in Albany had been reported in a public letter and printed in the Albany Register, with the phrase a still more despicable opinion glossed but not specified. Burr, defeated for the governorship, had demanded the retraction of the phrase. Hamilton, by a series of letters running from the eighteenth of June to the twenty-seventh, had refused to disavow it.

THE NIGHT IN THE OFFICE ON GARDEN STREET

On the evening of the tenth of July 1804 he was at his law-office in Manhattan, putting his papers in order. He drew a will, listed his debts (which were considerable; the country house at Harlem Heights, lately finished, had been built on borrowed money), wrote letters of farewell to Eliza which were to be opened only in the event, and then, on a separate sheet, set down for the record his reasons. He believed, he wrote, that duelling was contrary to religion and to law. He had nothing against Burr's person. He had felt himself unable to disavow opinions which he had in fact held and expressed. I have resolved, if our interview is conducted in the usual manner, and it pleases God to give me the opportunity, to reserve and throw away my first fire, and I have thoughts even of reserving my second fire. He signed the paper, placed it in the desk, and told no one. He did not tell his second Nathaniel Pendleton. He did not tell his physician David Hosack. He went home by ferry across to his lodgings near at hand and slept, by his own later account, a few hours.

THE LEDGE AT WEEHAWKEN

At twenty past six on the morning of the eleventh of July a rowing-boat put him across the Hudson with Pendleton and Hosack and the case of pistols, the hair-trigger duelling pistols belonging to his brother-in-law John Church which had killed his son three years before on the same ground. The day was already hot. A low mist sat on the river. The cliff at Weehawken rose two hundred feet above the water, and the duelling-ground was a grass shelf cut into the rock face, twenty paces by six, screened from the river by a stand of cedar. Burr was already there with William Van Ness. The seconds paced out the ground, seven feet two inches by Pendleton's measure, drew lots for position and for the count, loaded the pistols out of sight of the principals, and presented them. The rules were ten paces, the count one, two, three, fire upon the count. Hosack withdrew below the brow of the ledge so as to be able to swear, if afterwards called, that he had not witnessed the discharge.

A QUARTER OF A MINUTE

The pistol in his hand had a trigger set at half a pound. He had known it for years; the same trigger had taken his son. He understood, standing on the marked ground with the cedars behind Burr and the river two hundred feet below and the early sun coming over the New Jersey shoulder of the cliff, that the convention required him to face the muzzle, that the paper in his desk on Garden Street required him to throw the ball away, and that the half-pound trigger required him to do it before his arm was level, because if he raised the pistol to the aim his finger would discharge it of its own. He saw Burr opposite, in his black coat, the pistol at his side. He thought of the country house, of Eliza at the country house with the children, of the provision made. Remember, my Eliza, you are a Christian. He had practised the law thirty years and knew that intention is a thing not provable from the act; the ball into the cedar would be enough; the seconds would tell it after. Pendleton called present. He raised the pistol. The half-pound trigger gave. The ball went into the cedar branch ten feet above and four feet to the right of Burr's head, and was found there by Pendleton, with Van Ness, the following morning. Burr's pistol fired an instant after, or simultaneously: on this the two seconds afterwards disagreed in writing and never reconciled. The ball struck him in the right side above the iliac crest, broke the second lumbar vertebra, and lodged in the spinal column. His legs gave under him. He said to Hosack as the surgeon came up, this is a mortal wound, doctor, and then fainted.

THE HOUSE ON JANE STREET

They carried him down to the boat and rowed him across to Manhattan and to the house of his friend William Bayard at 80 Jane Street in Greenwich. He recovered consciousness on the water. Hosack gave him sal volatile and water, and he asked after the pistol, and was told it had not discharged, and then remembered that it had, and was silent. At the house they laid him in a downstairs room. He lived thirty-one hours. Bishop Benjamin Moore of the Episcopal Church was sent for and came, and demurred for an hour over administering Communion to a man fallen in a duel, and at length consented on Hamilton's word that he repented of the practice and bore Burr no malice. Eliza was brought from the country house at Harlem Heights, told only that her husband was unwell; she learned the truth at the bedside. The seven children were brought in one at a time on the morning of the twelfth, ranged at the foot of the bed in order of age, and he looked at them without speaking. He died at two o'clock in the afternoon of the twelfth of July 1804.

THE ROOMS OF THE REPUBLIC

Burr did not approach the body. He left the ground within ten minutes, was rowed back to Richmond Hill in lower Manhattan, breakfasted, and received visitors as if from a morning's ride. Within a fortnight the Coroner of Bergen County in New Jersey indicted him for murder, and the Coroner's jury of New York did the same. He fled south to the plantations of his Carolina friends, then north again to Washington, and there in the chamber of the Senate, between the third of February and the first of March 1805, presided as Vice President of the United States over the impeachment trial of Mr. Justice Samuel Chase of the Supreme Court, a duty the Constitution would not let him put down. He discharged it with the formal dignity of his office, took his leave of the Senate on the second of March in a speech which was said by men who had cause to hate him to have moved them, and went out of the chamber a private citizen under indictment for murder in two states. He held no public office again. He went west, into the Louisiana territory, on a scheme whose object the historians of the republic still dispute, was arrested by President Jefferson's order on a charge of treason, was tried at Richmond before Chief Justice Marshall in 1807 and acquitted, sailed for Europe, lived four years in exile between London and Paris in narrow circumstances, returned to New York under the name Edwards, practised the law in obscure chambers in Reade Street, and died in a boarding-house on Staten Island on the fourteenth of September 1836, aged eighty.

THE LONG ACCOUNT

The funded debt of the United States, the customs service, the Bank of the United States, the mint, the doctrine of the implied powers, the Federalist papers, the standing army of the constitutional period: these were the works of his eleven years in public life, and they held. The bank he founded in 1784 in Manhattan, the Bank of New York, is the oldest in the country and trades still. Eliza outlived him fifty years, raised the orphan asylum in Manhattan which still bears her hand, and pressed her husband's papers on John Church Hamilton and on the printers until the seven volumes of the Works appeared, and was buried at his side in the yard of Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street in 1854, aged ninety-seven. The Church pistols passed through the Church family to the Bank of New York and rest now in its vault. The Weehawken ground, eroded by railway cuttings in the nineteenth century, is laid out as Hamilton Park on the Boulevard East in Weehawken, New Jersey, with a bronze bust at the spot. In the autumn of 2015 a musical taken from the 1995 biography by Ron Chernow opened at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Forty-Sixth Street in Manhattan and sold, in its first decade of performance, five and a half million tickets, and made the affair on the ledge above the Hudson one of the few duels of the early republic that the citizens of his adopted country can name. The grave under Trinity, in sight of the Treasury he built, takes a fresh wreath every eleventh of July.